‘Daredevil’ Recap, Episode 5: Date Night!

What to make of this strange character, a main focus of this aptly titled episode, “World On Fire”? Beyond the fact that she knows how to make an entrance, I mean?

Well, for one thing, she speaks to Daredevil’s casting chops. Ayelet Zurer, like Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll and Rosario Dawson and even Vincent D’Onofrio in his way, is what our friends across the pond call “the thinking man’s crumpet.” TV is a visual medium, and casting is, among many other things, a paintbrush. The faces and voices and bodies of the actors selected color how we see their world, and how much time we want to spend in it. But when you watch attractive people parade around the superhero/supernatural shows on the CW, say, it’s like attack of the clones up in there — an indistinguishable onslaught of the bland and the beautiful. By contrast, Vanessa, Matt, Karen, and Claire look like human beings. Hot human beings, yes, but human beings nonetheless.

Second, she solves a dispiriting problem faced by contemporary TV: A lot of people who watch antihero shows hate the women on them. Just ask someone who plays one! Because they present an obstacle of doubt, derision, or suspicion in the path of the larger-than-life men in their lives, viewers who live vicariously through those men want those obstacles taken out with extreme prejudice. This is almost never the fault of the shows or the characters — Skyler White, Carmela Soprano, and Betty Draper, to name three commonly cited examples, are as complex and engaging as Walter, Tony, and Don. But if you’re looking to hack the structural security of New Golden Age TV Dramas, it’s an easy entry point to exploit.

The courtship of Kingpin and Vanessa breaks this mold in several ways. We meet them not years into a long-term relationship, but as they’re first getting to know each other. It’s a wonderfully oddball way to introduce your series’ main villain, yeah, but it also cuts through the Gordian Knot of the so-called “wife problem”: Vanessa is going into this with her eyes wide open.

And she likes what she sees — another important distinction. Wilson Fisk presents himself to her as both a danger and a dreamer. He’s open about his own brutality, yet he waxes rhapsodic about his plan to remake the city in a new image. It makes perverse sense that Vanessa, the owner of an art gallery, would go for a guy with an artist’s temperament at heart.

I may not know art, but I know what I like.

But there’s a trick to how Wilson and Vanessa connect as they gaze out at the fires he’s started. Fisk sells himself as a sort of über-vigilante, a criminal who kills criminals to make the city a better place overall. Take away the lethal part and this is precisely the M.O. of his arch-enemy, Daredevil. Earlier in the episode, Fisk blamed Daredevil for the decapitation of the Russian mob boss he himself perpetrated to kick off a war. Now, to win that war, he’s claiming DD’s clean-up-the-streets campaign for his own.

The irony is that it’s Matt Murdock who’s getting dressed down for adopting the methods of his enemies. In the very same episode where we got to see Claire through his eyes…

…and in which they shared their first kiss…

…she rejects a romance with him by saying “I just don’t think I can let myself fall in love with someone who’s so damn close to becoming what he hates.” Which is true enough, as far as it goes. After all, it’s Daredevil, not Kingpin, who beats the shit out of a cop in this episode.

And it’s Daredevil who gets some poor blind drugrunner killed when he shows up to beat up the guy’s Russian connects.

That scene said a lot about our hero. It was shot as a long take, which is fast becoming Daredevil’s signature; you could tell he was coming a minute or two before he even showed up. And it basically had us sitting inside the cab with this guy for ages as he sang a pretty song in the language of his home — just before he got his brains blown out by someone who was aiming at Daredevil instead. Fisk isn’t the only lawbreaker whose actions cause collateral damage.

Speaking of which, Matt & Claire and Wilson & Vanessa weren’t the only couple clicking in this ep. Karen had the bright idea of using Matt’s face-touching technique to initiate intimacy with Foggy as they ate dinner at their gentrification-victim client’s apartment. It was sweet and kinda awkward and also kinda hot.

And then:

if you wanted a symbolic representation of the way in which Wilson Fisk’s crimes destroy and disrupt the lives of everyday people, look no further. Can he keep Vanessa’s gaze fixed on the forest he’s promised to plant, instead of the trees he’s chopping down to get there?